Everyone wants to think that they have a sophisticated taste in music, right? Including me. :P In one of many pointless internet surveys/rankings that don't mean anything at all, you can now check "how mainstream" your taste is. ;) And, of course, everyone is trying to be "not mainstream", right? :P

You need a last.fm profile for this. last.fm records music you listen to and sends the artist/track names to a website that has all kinds of statistics about your music taste. So this website takes your 30 most favorite artists and scores them based on how many other last.fm user listen to those. Finally you get a score in terms of a number, and so far I'm beating everyone at this. :D :P

Rock 'n Roll! You are 5.72 % mainstream!

How to cheat: Rename your favorite songs to "Artist1 - Song1" through "Artist30 - Song30", play them for a while, then check your score. Better yet, change those names to something like "Qz6SioAp91Z - T1zIqmL09r" for a better shot at the title.

How do you like the stupid pun? :P

Seriously though, I'm in awe of Moby. His gift for making feel good music is seemingly unmatched. And the music is so simple too, I tend to be a sucker for complicated, but his basic compositions really appeal to me. The instruments obviously play a big part in it, Moby loves strings and so do I. But the arrangement is such that it brings out a different set of emotions than just about any other music.

Like this song from the "Miami Vice" soundtrack. The musical "canvas" isn't at all cluttered with elements, he's keeping it simple and meaningful. And lots of repetition. But repetition is only bad when you're repeating something nasty. Then there's Patti LaBelle's excellent voice to top it off. It's a winner. :star:

Yeah, very cool new offering from Amarok this week. Amarok, of course, being THE best music player on the planet the last few years and they have new releases very close to each other with a lot of innovation, this is really fast paced open source development at its finest. In the newly released version 1.4.4, Amarok has added integration with the Magnatune music store.

Why do we care? The thing is, Magnatune is a pretty cool, modern music label that signs a lot of musicians and gives them a much better deal than the established music industry (which is known to sponsor certain marketable artists through the roof while leaving the rest in the gutter). They have also taken the new medium that is the internet for what it is and sell mp3s without DRM. And they cut 50% of the price right to the artists, so you know they are not being paid in peanuts. You can buy an album for a price you set yourself (minimum is $5).

But Magnatune only has music that isn't licensed by other labels, which means none of that stuff I've ever even heard, how do I know what's what? This is where Amarok comes in. On Magnatune's site, you can listen to the music before you buy anything (you could even record it if you wanted to bend the rules a little bit), but with Amarok now integrating the collection, you can just drag and drop albums or tracks right onto your playlist, just as you do with files on disk. Hell, you can queue up all of Magnatune if you wanted to. So essentially, you can listen to all that music for free, just as long as you're online. Of course, if you want it on the mp3 player, you'll have to buy it. (Or if you want to support Magnatune and the artist for offering this.) They sell albums in mp3 format and on cds (remember those plastic things?).

So up until this point Magnatune was there, but with Amarok it's going to be a lot more accessible and a lot more people are going to hear about it. Classic example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

In this day and age, with the consumer being treated like dirt, whenever a company launches an offer that is actually good, it's such a revelation. One such revelation (of which there are few), I discovered today, is allofmp3.com. I'm actually in awe of these Russian entrepreneurs. So let me tell you why that is.

1. They let you preview a track before buying in low quality (this is actually disappointing, because you have no idea how it really sounds).
2. They let YOU pick the encoding you want, among all the most widely used formats. How amazing is that? :cool:
3. All content is usable (no DRM).
4. The price of a track depends on the the sound quality you pick (ie. you pay by quality), but the prices are generally low.
5. Their collection is wide enough to carry albums that I actually want.

To give you a concrete example.. The other day I was raving about "Chevaliers de Sangreal" from the Da Vinci Code movie. I search for the album on allofmp3, they have it. The price for this track (at 192kbps mp3) is $0.18. I put it in my basket, I set the encoding to FLAC lossless compression, the calculated charge is $0.71. Meanwhile, Apple's iTunes Store, as far as I know, charges $0.99 per track (I cannot verify this as the store is only available through iTunes, which of course, has no linux support).

Granted, their payment system is a bit of a pain. They make you transfer a minimum of $10 into your account before you can buy anything. And I had to do this through a different site, even had to use my cell phone to retrieve a pin code they sent me. But, if you're a frequent customer, just transfer $100 in one go and you won't have to do this for a long time again.

The one drawback I've seen is that while they keep track of the tracks you've bought (no pun intended), they won't let you re-download them. So once you download, keep it in a safe place (like backup to CD/DVD).

The average album on allofmp3 costs about $2.50, that is 11x, E-L-E-V-E-N T-I-M-E-S, less than the average album in a music store in Norway, at 180kr ~ $27 (perhaps Holland is a bit cheaper, I rarely go to music stores anymore, I wouldn't know). And for that you get tracks at 192kbps (which is fine for most music, soundtracks and classical is more demanding music, I might get that in higher bitrates or FLAC), and you can buy per track. Not to mention that I never use CDs, because mp3s are so much more practical (and even if I did I could burn the CDs myself). Give me one good reason why I should ever buy another CD again.

So the new album was released March 29 and I hadn't heard a peep about it, which indicates lousy publicity. That's a bit unusual but it's the tip of the iceberg. The album sucks. Really sucks. I can't believe this is Will, I can't believe he would release something this bad. After listening through it, there were only two tracks I ever wanted to hear again, the rest were trash. Vaguely interesting are "Lost & found" and "Tell me why", although in the latter he gets a little too excited.

But wait, there's more. There hasn't been an album yet where Willie talks about himself and his greatness in every feckin song. Now I realize that rap isn't a genre of humility, a rap song without trash talk and self adoration just wouldn't cut it (unless it's about something else entirely). Rap is about struggle and adversity but enough is enough. When there's nothing else on the entire album than manifestation of the artist's greatness, something has gone terribly wrong somewhere. What's more, the music is terrible, so there's absolutely nothing to rescue it. When I heard the song "Switch" (presumably something to do with the movie "Hitch", although the song wasn't in it), I thought it was crap. Yet on the album you get it in three different versions!?

I sincerely hope the album sells exceptionally badly so Big Willie gets a wake up call and starts putting out quality music again. Jeez, he even did one song with that clown Snoop Dogg, big surprise it really sucks.

2/10